Two-Way Traffic

Two hundred years ago, pioneers poured through Cumberland Gap on their way west to a better life, but travel on the Wilderness Road also flowed eastward as early as the 1820s, when drovers pushed huge herds of hogs and smaller herds of cattle and sheep through the Gap to markets in Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston, hundreds of miles from the growing Kentucky settlements. Cumberland Gap bears the name given by Dr. Thomas Walker, who crossed the mountain in 1750 with a party of Virginia real estate speculators; a wealthy neighbor of Peter Jefferson, father of Thomas Jefferson, Walker helped promote emigration west into Kentucky through his journals and maps of trans-Appalachian travel. Kentucky's rich soil supported frontier farming, but cash was scarce, and hogs brought from the East multiplied in the fertile woods and canebrakes, making them especially valuable because they could drive themselves to distant markets. Western settlers also earned substantial money from whiskey, which concentrated the value of corn into a product cheaper to transport and easier to sell than bulky grain. In 1823, a Wilderness Road traveler reported encountering immense droves of hogs headed into Virginia, including two droves of 700 or 800 each and two others as numerous.

Kentucky · United States